There is only one fault: incapacity to feed upon light, for where capacity to do this has been lost all faults are possible….
Simone Weil
(Montségur)
High, high and sure, far above the poplars’ spreading tips,
at the very spur’s end where its lowest stones still loom
in sheer ascent, triangulate like an arrowhead, the chateau
holds its skull-eyed gaze heavenward: impregnable puog,
secure mons, matter’s outpost, where the pure ones, cathari,
spirit’s troubadours inside their virginal Altaforte, kept
the faith against the faithful, a consolation of the perfect,
each an angel’s genderless life trapped within the physical,
bodies bereft of goodness like all things visible, like all
created things—corrupt wastage of an evil demi-god—
the Eucharist just straw through the body’s sieve, Christ
a masquerade of flesh, and impure souls fated to return
from death to death through each vital dross condemned,
unless on death’s bed they shun all drink, all food, endure
the wine’s liberation from earth, the lost light’s from wine.
So, from Innocent’s decree the armies besieged them there
in Languedoc, in Toulouse, as in Béziers and Carcassonne,
the men and women equally, equally held in God’s regard,
and marched them down from the safe hill, a late Masada,
to the prat del cremat, cheering the screams as the flames
licked flesh, stoked pyres blanching incense to the winds
where Rome scattered coins and Neanderthals camped—
this “genius of Occitan” that set the belated Lady afire
in her own flawlessness: a swirl upon the stair, Audiart, Audiart….
(String)
Not the village, south of Viana do Castello, not the blessing,
but the whine of turbines in the factory’s packed clatter-box—
Alsthom, Langlois, Luchaire, Salmson, Gevelot, Renault…
So, she makes rounds to bring herself under: her “project”
to know the workers’ true estate at bobbin-furnace, belt,
stamping press and mill, casts her lot by choice with those
destined by duress, yet amazed to see the women gossiping
after work, “chattering” while she in “a cold fury” walks
to the Seine, wondering if she were “condemned to this life”
could she resist “throwing herself in?” And rouge applied
to her lips, rose to her cheeks, to coax managers to hire her:
one “with his carved head, twisted, tormented, monastic”—
even whips succumb to affliction, the human humiliated.
Consider as postulate a metaphor: all creation an open string,
every note thrumming in relation on the scale, ratio, octave
by octave, playable because of the string: Love is the string,
vehicle and tenor, affliction the far strut “where violence
turns to suffering”—harm harmonized in privation of God.
But to have this condition plucked, plucked again and again,
what note will be raised? “The resigned docility of the beast
of burden: to be born to wait, receive, and carry out orders…
And always, one’s need for the external signs of one’s value.”
Cue the truth of force, inescapable, the Revolution doomed.
Cue the Jacob’s ladder of the freighter to Portugal and Spain.
(Processions)
Nascent silence. Above the sea, a full moon ripples its light
in folds of waves, the same light settling like powdered silver
on the village where women, candles in their hands, voices
lifting the ancient hymns, move in procession to the shore
to bless the boats. No céu desponta nova luz—in the sky dawns
new light? Something sadder, Simone believes, heart-rending,
for the village is “wretched,” and what is borne in upon her
confirms what she has known: the red-hot iron, the mark
of the slave, given to the afflicted, with the religion of slaves.
On her first day in her first factory in her year of factory work,
she had arrived in a white blouse; the workers saw her hands,
soft, as yet unscarred—a student who had failed her exams?—
not this professor with her “inborn awkwardness” offering
herself to the machines, like a copper bobbin to the furnace,
flames licking hands, arms, her unable to close the shutter:
unable, at one shop then another to meet the need for speed,
to work without thought, like the cutter slicing her thumb,
the mill that drives the metal shaving in her palm—slavery
“not in the circumstances, but carried by the work itself”—
her upset at seeing the conveyor belt, its frantic procession
under the pendulum, the human cognates at their given task…
All most unlike this living circle of women walking, singing
round, round their husband’s boats, again, now, for centuries,
a full moon, the sea below rippling light. This nascent silence.